


Night Flights

by Ayulsa (execharmonious)



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Esper Terra, F/F, TEAM SHIVA, but if you read into it the right way..., magic!meta, probably not actually that mature so don't get your hopes up, so i err on the side of caution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/execharmonious/pseuds/Ayulsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody knows why Terra goes, but Celes feels it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Flights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stealth_Noodle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/gifts).



> Inspired by a mix of Stealth_Noodle's prompts for magic experimentation and Esper Terra. Because I adore both of these things.

Of all their contingent, Celes was the only one who knew about the night flights.

In part, this was because she kept later hours than the rest: Shadow was typically the only one who stayed awake longer, and then only to wander off Goddesses-knew-where doing Goddesses-knew-what while the night was on his side. If he ever saw a pink streak pass him by on his journeys, illuminating the surrounding lands with Esper-glow, he never let on.

But it was never the pale luminosity of Terra's Esper form that alerted Celes. Nor was it the susurration of leaves and the whipping of tent fabric as she swept overhead, the cawing birds she stirred skywards, startled, the crashing of a lake monster retreating to the deep at the sight of something fiercer yet. Even on nights when she was asleep with the rest of them, potion-drunk and wounded and numb to the outside world, she knew.

Tonight was one such night.

Celes dreamed, but it was no natural dream. She was familiar with the landscapes of those, the few places that dogged her nightmares time and again, scenarios playing out that she stood helpless to change. Maranda. The Magitek Research Facility. The crumbling of the world she'd known, a slow, syrupy descent into blackness from which she could not clamber out.

This dream, like all Terra-dreams, had no place or time to speak of, encapsulated no memories, dredged up no buried horrors. It lacked end and beginning, boundary and shape. There was no _Celes_ here, no Terra or Kefka or ruined world, just the push and pull and weft and flow of ever-shifting, ever-changing energy, washing over and through her like ocean waves. She drowned in them, as them, thoughts and concepts escaping her mind as bubbles rising in a sea of pink, sunset-stained and warm and gentle as summer sand. She rose, and fell, and crashed against shores she could not name, until eventually she came to herself drenched and bedraggled, tongues of magic lapping at her fringes, her body once again painfully, exquisitely whole.

She jolted awake, shivering though anything but cold. It was hard to entangle oneself in a sleeping bag, but she seemed to have managed it; or maybe the sweat frosted on her skin had simply frozen the fabric to her limbs. It had happened before. She wiped the ice crystals from her forehead with a sleeve, blinked away the magic that sparked behind her eyes, licked Terra's name from her lips where it lingered, almost escaped. Disgruntled, noting the hour by the slice of sky through her tent-flap-- _far_ too early-- she fell back onto her pillow and tried once more to sleep.

Her mind, stubborn as ever, remained alert. Restless tension swelled inside her again like a bubble poised to burst. There was no hope of relief from it, not tonight, not with Esper magic in the air.

She knew why Terra's flights tormented her. A side effect of the infusion was that she was sensitised to magic; to gain mastery over her weakness, she'd taken up the discipline of the ancient Rune Knights, a tribe of magi whose bodies were naturally energised by magic and who'd honed this ability into an effective battle strategy. Having trained herself in their teachings in what spare time her military career had afforded, she could now channel the energy of spells she chose yet block out ambient magic that threatened to overwhelm her senses. Faced with a blast from Ultima itself, she could have drawn it into her body or cast it aside.

But Terra was not a spell to be absorbed or controlled. Terra was living, breathing Esper energy itself, boundless and untameable. The average person might have felt a tingle as she passed; to Celes' heightened senses, she was a tsunami, a firestorm, blazing over the landscape and through her nervous system every time she flew. And to attempt to turn that aside, or snuff it out, would have been to extinguish her life. She could no more stop Terra from crashing over her than she could stop Terra's heart from beating; and the very thought of _that_ made the air still in her throat.

Besides, nettled as she was by the disturbances in her sleep, she wasn't sure she wanted respite. It fit somehow, in a strange way, Terra's immeasurable light and the void in her, Terra's call and her response. If a born half-Esper and a made half-Esper could be part of the Goddesses' plan, then perhaps she and Terra were two halves of a whole, a splintered truth made to match. Though in all honesty, she doubted the Goddesses had any plan at all, or that Terra would see it that way. Why should _she_ see anything special in her nature, when it was as obvious to her as the sky? And Celes' own nature was nothing to yearn for.

Well, she certainly wasn't getting any sleep on the tail of that thought.

Resigned, she disentangled herself from her sleeping bag and crept to the mouth of her tent, tying back the flaps to let in the near-dawn, its pinkening edges driving back the stars. All around her the camp was silent, save for the thin hum of insects and the occasional distant snore. This was why she typically made camp as far from Cyan as possible. The otherwise refined and noble samurai had a snore like Edgar's chainsaw. Ordinarily she might have laughed at the sound, incongruous against the pale half-light, the stillness; but right now it just irritated her, and not-- not wholly-- for lack of sleep.

She stared up at the sky, thirsting for something just beyond her grasp. Something bigger than herself, it seemed, something wide and wild and alive and free. Something like the way the magic made her feel, like she was drowning, like she was flying. She wished she could fly, up there with Terra, cut loose the ties that bound and simply soar.

But it wasn't in her nature: not to fly, nor to be free. The general's mask would not come unglued so easily. If she'd been born with the gifts Terra had, she would probably still never have taken the leap off the ground. Terra ascended, an earth-born spirit seeking her rightful wings; Celes had been born to heaven's splendour yet only fallen further with each step she'd made. The only leaps she was any good at taking aimed downwards.

The last morning star twinkled down at her from above. _I'm the darkness; you're the starlight..._ She let out a dry chuckle to herself. 

As if summoned-- perhaps by a dream-oath, Celes mused-- the star became a comet, its trail blazing brighter as it veered towards the earth. Brighter and brighter yet, until-- no, it _was_ coming this way; that wasn't her imagination... The rational answer had no time to hit before instinct took over, throwing her backwards and away from the ultimately harmless spectacle that was Terra's descent.

Terra landed with an animal's grace, furred toes grazing earth before fading to human flesh, the layers of light peeling away from her as she touched the ground. Celes, by contrast, was now sprawled on the dirt; the tent, one of its poles snapped beneath her weight, had sagged down onto her head, half-shrouding her in off-white canvas.

She coughed a little, a _we'll-not-speak-of-this-to-the-others_ sort of sound, and Terra giggled goodnaturedly as she moved to help her friend up. Human now, she still seemed to glide a little as she walked, and her hand, when it touched Celes', felt sunwarmed despite the hour. Celes got to her feet, her eyes tracing the ends of curls that were still pink-tipped, glittering as if aflame.

"What has you up this early?" said Terra, and if Celes had been Edgar she'd have let slip the first thing that came to mind: _Watching the stars._

Instead, she simply inclined her head towards the nearby tent, allowing a corner of her mouth to quirk upwards. "Cyan's snoring. And you?"

Terra looked about to laugh, but then her eyes flicked away from Celes', though she'd already caught a glimpse of the embers within them. "...Searching, I suppose," she said after a beat, her voice now low.

"For what?" Celes' fingers were still laced with Terra's, the magic arcing between them making her skin tingle. Her palms frosted over anew, and she knew Terra would feel it, but there was no helping it.

"I'm not sure I know," said Terra. Celes could hear-feel-see the blood thundering in her veins, a jittery rhythm that fluttered at her throat and through her fingertips, like a songbird caged. From the exertion, no doubt; flying had to be hard work. And Terra's heart always ran faster, just as Celes knew her own beat more slowly, and not just from current grogginess. There were any number of reasons why she could feel Terra's hot-quick pulse hammering against her hand, a second bloodbeat that seemed to fill her veins to bursting, to aching. 

But Terra's hand had not released hers, either. And so in that moment, Celes allowed herself to hope.


End file.
